Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Face the Nation" channel.

  1. As regards flooding, the U.N. IPCC admits having “low confidence” in even the “sign” of any changes—in other words, it is just as likely that climate change is making floods less frequent and less severe. In a study on the climate impact on flooding for the USA and Europe, published in the Journal of Hydrology, Volume 552, September 2017, Pages 704-717, the study found: ‘The number of significant trends was about the number expected due to chance alone.’ ‘Changes in the frequency of major floods are dominated by multidecadal variability.’ ‘The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded (Hartmann et al., 2013) that globally there is no clear and widespread evidence of changes in flood magnitude or frequency in observed flood records.’ ‘The results of this study, for North America and Europe, provide a firmer foundation and support the conclusion of the IPCC that compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.’
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  2. This is nonsense. It was hotter in the recent and distant past. There is no satellite data before 1979, and there was no real network of temperature stations outside Europe and America before the 1950s, so "hottest ever" is not very long! It was much hotter in America in the 1930s, and the Vikings grew barley on Greenland, which is impossible today. This is bull meant to scare people into giving up their prosperity. Satellite data shows the Earth is continuing to warm steadily at around one-tenth of a degree Celsius per decade. If we didn't have thermometers we couldn't even notice it.
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  3. There is no climate crisis. 10% decline in natural disasters since 2000. Accumulated cyclone energy shows no increasing trend. Global hurricane landfalls shows no trend. Downward global trend for total hurricaine numbers. NOAA: "We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes." NOAA data 1851-2021 shows no trend in number of hurricaine landfalls with the record high being 1886. The trend for over 7 decades has been downwards in the Pacific as well. Drought appears to be decreasing globally measured by SPI 1901-2017. Global trends show no increasing flooding frequency or severity. For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes have declined 98%. Deserts have shrunk considerably since the 1980's. The Sahara shrank by 12,000km² per year 1984-2015. The Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime. The Great Barrier Reef's coral cover has reached the greatest extent ever recorded. On extinction the rate is very low: 900 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years, so from observations there are an average of slightly less than 2 species lost every year. Global temperatures maxed out in 2016 and have been lower ever since. There is no climate crisis.
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  4. Lies and propaganda. Burn acreage was much, much, higher in the US during the 1920's, 30's and 40's. It peaked in 1930 at well over 50,000,000 acres. The trend is downwards (1926-2020 NIFC US) eventhough CO2 has increased exponentially. For 2000 onwards the average burn acreage is much less than 10,000,000 acres. The number of fires has also declined. Remember CO2 was increasing all the time. For the whole of Canada the largest burn acreage was 1989, and there is no trend for the period 1980-2021. Over that same period the trend for number of fires was slightly downwards (CNFDB). Note that 2020 had the lowest recorded burn acreage and number of fires.
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  5. The Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime. "The greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year"(NASA, 2019). Observations of Earth’s vegetative cover since the year 2000 by NASA’s Terra satellite show a 10% increase in vegetation in the first 20 years of the century. Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016 (Nature, 2018). As well as human intervention, the reasons for this include forests expanding polewards aided by additional CO2 and a slight rise in temperature.
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  6. @brothervance1932  Not only are China and India getting greener, but forests are expanding northwards, and deserts are shrinking. The Sahara shrank by 12,000km² per year 1984-2015(Liu & Xue, 2020). Also that "potent greenhouse gas" is keeping us fed. A US DoE study (Taylor & Schlenker, 2021) estimated that a 1 ppm increase in CO2 led to an increase of 0.4%, 0.6% and 1% in yield for corn, soybeans and wheat, respectively, and that CO2 increase was the main driver of the 500% yield growth in corn since 1940. There is no objective evidence that we are in a global climate crisis. The Chinese and Indians must be laughing at the West as we destroy our ability to maintain our prosperity and propel ourselves back to pre-industrial poverty.
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